I can still remember entire quest lines and party positioning for encounters, that is how much I played the game. I am, however, not paying €20 for the reskinned version. Passed for that with the BG1 edition as well.

DerAppie:I can still remember entire quest lines and party positioning for encounters, that is how much I played the game. I am, however, not paying €20 for the reskinned version. Passed for that with the BG1 edition as well.

It's on Steam now, and I'm sure it'll be on sale soon for about $2.50.

I played through the entire Baldur's Gate trilogy (using the Trilogy mod to combine the first and second games into a single campaign, the "Unfinished Business" fan mods for both games, the Ascension mod -- created by former BioWare employee David Gaider -- for the ending of Throne of Bhaal and a set of unofficial fixes to avert several unpatched bugs) last year, as a means of cleansing the memory of Mass Effect 3's ending from my mind.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and I likely will play through the series again in the future.

However, I have little motivation to re-purchase a game that I already own.

I played BG2 like crazy when I first got my hands on it. Then I thought it was OK. Then I hated it and I've hated it ever since. Which is a shame, because it's a masterpiece with only one truly shiatty idea, but once you realize you're tasting shiat it kind of overwhelms everything.

The gameplay is EXCELLENT and the dungeons are AWESOME and the items are COOL and mood is MOODY. . . but the story just isn't about you. It's about a couple of vampire douchebags (and some absurdly obvious crypto-bastards) who walk all over you and cackle with glee while doing it, over and over and over again. They really rub in this whole "you're a puny pathetic weakling dancing in the palm of the bad guy" sadism to such an extent that I daresay the designers would be genuinely shocked if I pointed out that that's not fun for the guy playing the game. There isn't any sort of catharsis-inducing ass-whupping of evil; in the most decisive bossfight victory I earned (one of WAY too many encounters with the final boss but not the last one as that's a fair bit tougher), it turns out it was easy because the BBEG was scripted to scoff at my puny efforts and teleport out anyway. And the final battle? You win, you leave, the guy gets up AGAIN and finally suffers Death by Cutscene. You're not in the scene. That's right; you're even denied the satisfaction of finishing off the guy who bullied your ass for 50+ hours, which is essentially the whole story of the game. The writers were that in love with the bad guy.

The fact that you're forced to walk into every screamingly obvious trap set for you is a fresh pile of vomit on top of the shiat. I won't play any "enhanced edition" of BG2 until I'm at least given the option to kill Saemon Havarian. For those of you who don't know, he's the blatantly slimy NPC who couldn't be more obvious if he had "THIS MAN IS GOING TO SCREW YOU" blinking in 1.21 GW LED signs above his head, but you have no choice but to walk right into his betrayals because the game has scripted you with a case of the stupids. It's so annoying I once actually tried, and somehow managed, to kill the douchebag in Throne of Bhaal and the game promptly crashed.

dragonchild:The fact that you're forced to walk into every screamingly obvious trap set for you is a fresh pile of vomit on top of the shiat. I won't play any "enhanced edition" of BG2 until I'm at least given the option to kill Saemon Havarian. For those of you who don't know, he's the blatantly slimy NPC who couldn't be more obvious if he had "THIS MAN IS GOING TO SCREW YOU" blinking in 1.21 GW LED signs above his head, but you have no choice but to walk right into his betrayals because the game has scripted you with a case of the stupids. It's so annoying I once actually tried, and somehow managed, to kill the douchebag in Throne of Bhaal and the game promptly crashed.

Yes, you read that right.

I KILLED

A VILLAIN

In a FANTASY RPG

and the game

CRASHED.

The "players as spectators" concept was THAT broken.

Killing Saemon Havarian should not crash the game. You experienced an unusual bug, one that I am unable to establish as being commonly reported. Saemon is intended to be killable in Shadows of Amn after he has betrayed the party to githyanki. However, even if killed, he will nonetheless appear in Throne of Bhaal (as Throne of Bhaal only imports the data of the player and joinable NPC stats and inventory). However, he may be killed either in Amkethran or in his base before confronting Balthazar; him dying in either location should not adversely affect the game.

gopher321:I was underwhelmed with the original Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition from Beamdog. Not much enhancement, frankly.

Ditto. I didn't really feel that it added anything of real value that justified the price tag. And, honestly, I feel like the new graphics somehow detracted from it in a way by peeling away that "classic game" feeling.

When I play Baldur's Gate, I still fire up the patched copy from GoG. I don't think I'll bother with BGII: ED

The only time it ever pissed me off is when I was playing a Ranger, got my stronghold, put a bunch of cool stuff into it and went into the Planar sphere only to come out the other side several in-game days later to find that the stronghold was locked because the asshole quest giver couldn't find me and they got mad and shut me out.

ikanreed:Wait wait wait wait wait. Wait. NWN better than Baldur's Gate? What? Bad 3d is somehow better than good 2d? Did you like the text-dump plots? The complete lack of characters with any character?

Neverwinter Nights sucked.

Neverwinter Nights 2 was okay, but the camera design was hideously braindead and that was enough to drag an "okay" game down to "suck".

The point of NWN wasn't the little cute module that came with it. NWN was the *engine* that ran that module. If you bought NWN and only played the module thinking that's what NWN was about, you screwed yourself badly out of the point of the software. NWN is meant to be an engine to build and run adventures on yourself with friends over the internet or at the very least, play one of the many persistent servers out there with an amazing amount of work and awesome effort to create a fantasy world far better than WoW or Evercrack ever was.

NWN is still going after all this time and there are many good servers still running awesome content including Amia, Ravenloft, Isle of Thain, FRC, Lala land, Arelith...

skozlaw:ikanreed: Wait wait wait wait wait. Wait. NWN better than Baldur's Gate? What? Bad 3d is somehow better than good 2d? Did you like the text-dump plots? The complete lack of characters with any character?

Neverwinter Nights sucked.

Neverwinter Nights 2 was okay, but the camera design was hideously braindead and that was enough to drag an "okay" game down to "suck".

Both were great, though each had flaws.

NWN and the sequels provided a great platform to build on and a fun campaign to play through. while a lot was RPG boilerplate it offered a really memorable moment when I found the note in Aribeth's room in the tower suggestion betrayl and raced to the roof - killing everything in my way to stop it. Of course she had to be executed at the end and I liked having a different character bring her back from Hell in the final episode.